Science and the Akashic Field Quotes

“Life, and the cosmos as a whole, evolves as integrated entities within a network of constant formative interaction. Each thing not only “is,” it also “becomes.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“An isolated genome working through random mutations is unlikely to produce a mutant organism capable of surviving in its milieu because it is not enough for a mutation to produce one or a few positive changes in a species; it must produce the full set. The evolution of feathers, for example, does not produce a reptile that can fly: radical changes in musculature and bone structure are also required, along with a faster metabolism to power sustained flight. The development of the eye requires thousands of mutations, finely coordinated with one another. The probability of a single mutation producing positive results is almost nil: statistically only one mutation in twenty million is likely to be viable; each mutation by itself is likely to make the organism less rather than more fit than it was. And if it is less fit, sooner or later it is eliminated by natural selection.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“Quasi-instant, system-wide correlation cannot be produced solely by physical or even chemical interactions among molecules, genes, cells, and organs. Though some biochemical signaling—for example, of control genes—is remarkably efficient, the speed with which activating processes spread in the body, as well as the complexity of these processes, makes reliance on biochemistry alone insufficient. The conduction of signals through the nervous system, for example, cannot proceed faster than about twenty meters per second, and it cannot carry a large number of diverse signals at the same time. Yet there are quasi-instant, nonlinear, heterogeneous, and multidimensional correlations among all parts of the organism. The level of coherence in the organism suggests that in some respects it is a macroscopic quantum system. Living tissue is a “Bose-Einstein condensate”: a form of matter in which quantum-type processes—hitherto believed to be limited to the microscopic domain—occur at macroscopic scales.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The universe’s microwave background radiation proves to be isotropic—the same in all directions. This radiation is believed to be the remnant of the Big Bang; according to BB theory, it was emitted when the universe was about 400,000 years old. The problem is that at that point in time the opposite sides of the expanding universe were already ten million light-years apart. By that time, light could have traveled only 400,000 light-years, so no physical force or signal could have connected regions ten million light-years distant. Yet the cosmic background radiation is uniform for billions of light-years wherever we look in space.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“Gustav Fechner, the pragmatic founder of experimental methods in psychology, came to much the same conclusion. “When one of us dies,” he wrote after recovering from a serious illness, “it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger Earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new relations and develop throughout our whole finite life.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The “phase conjugation” that transmits information in holograms is a particular kind of selective resonance. It occurs when two interpenetrating wavefields contain synchronized oscillations at the same frequency. In that event the conjunction of the individual waves creates a spatially and temporally coherent channel of communication between the objects that emit the wavefields. Even when the wavefields contain oscillations at different frequencies, if they are in harmonic resonance (that is, when they constitute a series of two, four, eight, etc., waves per cycle, with synchronized peaks and troughs across the series) they produce a coherent channel of communication.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“Physicists discovered that all things in the universe are constantly oscillating at different frequencies. These oscillations generate wavefields that radiate from the objects that produce them. When the wavefield emanating from one object encounters another object, a part of it is reflected from that object, and a part is absorbed by it. The object becomes energized and creates another wavefield that moves back toward the object that emitted the initial wavefield.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“In the in-formed universe our brain/ mind can access a broad band of information, well beyond the information conveyed by our five sensory organs. We are, or can be, literally “in touch” with almost any part of the world, whether here on Earth or beyond in the cosmos. When we do not repress the corresponding intuitions, we can be in-formed by things as small as a particle or as large as a galaxy.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The rudimentary consciousness of matter at a lower level of organization (the neurons in the brain) becomes integrated in the more evolved consciousness of conscious matter at a higher level of organization (the brain as a whole). This does away with the hard problem of the materialist view without doing the kind of violence to our everyday apprehension of the world that idealism does (according to which all is mind, and nothing but mind). It also does away with the problem of dualism, one that is just a shade less “hard” than that of materialism—because if matter and mind interact (as they must interact in the brain), then we must still say how “something as unconscious as matter” can act on, and be acted on by “something as immaterial as consciousness.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The view that consciousness is produced in and by the brain is just one of the many ways philosophically inclined people have envisaged the relationship between the physical brain and the conscious mind. It is the materialist way. It maintains that consciousness is a kind of by-product of the survival functions the brain performs for the organism. As organisms become more complex, they require a more complex “computer” to steer them so they can get the food, the mate, and the related resources they need in order to survive and reproduce. At a given point in this development, consciousness appears. Synchronized neural firings and transmissions of energy and chemical substances between synapses produce the qualitative stream of experience that makes up the woof and warp of consciousness. Consciousness is not primary in the world; it is an “epi-phenomenon” generated by a complex material system: the human brain. The materialist way of envisaging the relationship of brain and mind is not the only way. Philosophers have also outlined the idealist way. In the idealist perspective, consciousness is the first and only reality; matter is but an illusion created by our mind. This assumption, while outlandish on first sight, makes eminent sense as well: after all, we do not experience the world directly; we experience it only through our consciousness. We normally assume that there is a qualitatively different physical world beyond our consciousness, but that may be an illusion. Everything we experience could be part of our consciousness. The material world could be merely our invention as we try to make sense of the flow of sensations in our consciousness. Then there is the dualist way of conceiving of the relationship between brain and consciousness, matter and mind. According to dualist thinkers, matter and mind are both fundamental, but they are entirely different, not reducible one to the other. The manifestations of consciousness cannot be explained by the organism that manifests them, not even by the staggeringly complex processes of the human brain. In this view the brain is the seat of consciousness, but it is not identical with it.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The fact that a high level of consciousness, with articulated images, thoughts, feelings, and rich subconscious elements, is associated with complex neural structures does not tell us that such consciousness is due to these structures. The observation that brain function is associated with consciousness does not entail that the brain creates consciousness.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“In Indian philosophy the ultimate end of the physical world is a return to Akasha, its original subtle-energy womb. At the end of time as we know it, the almost infinitely varied things and forms of the manifest world dissolve into formlessness, living beings exist in a state of pure potentiality, and dynamic functions condense into static stillness. In Akasha, all attributes of the manifest world merge into a state that is beyond attributes: the state of Brahman.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The quantum vacuum, the subtle energy and in-formation sea that underlies all “matter” in the universe, did not originate with the Bang that produced our universe, and it will not vanish when the particles created by that explosion fall back into it. The subtle energies and the active in-formation that underlie this universe were there before its particles appeared and will be there after they disappear. The deeper reality is the quantum vacuum, the enduring in-formation and energy sea that pulsates, producing periodic explosions that give rise to local universes.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The sum total of all forces in the universe, mental or physical, when resolved back to their original state, is called Prana. When there was neither aught nor naught, when darkness was covering darkness, what existed then? Then Akasha existed without motion. . . . At the end of a cycle the energies now displayed in the universe quieted down and became potential. At the beginning of the next cycle they start up, strike upon the Akasha, and out of the Akasha evolve these various forms . . .”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“We know that living organisms consist of as much as 70 percent water. But it was not known that the properties of water make life itself possible. These properties do not derive from the chemical composition of the H2O molecules of water; the decisive processes involve the bonds between the hydrogen components of the H2O molecules. These bonds are more than ten times weaker than the typical chemical bonds. Because of the stretching of the molecular bonds between hydrogen atoms and their host oxygen atom, every drop of water is a constantly forming and re-forming mixture of molecular structures.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“No matter how diverse the cells, organs, and organ systems of the organism, in essential respects they act as one. According to the experimental biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho they behave like a good jazz band, where every player responds immediately and spontaneously to the improvisations of the others. The super jazz band of an organism never ceases to play in a lifetime, expressing the harmonies and melodies of the individual organism with a recurring rhythm and beat but with endless variations.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“In a complex organism the challenge of maintaining dynamic equilibrium is gigantic. The human body consists of some million billion cells, far more than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Of this cell population, 600 billion are dying and the same number are regenerating every day—over 10 million cells per second. The average skin cell lives only for about two weeks; bone cells are renewed every three months. Every ninety seconds millions of antibodies are synthesized, each from about twelve hundred amino acids, and every hour 200 million erythrocytes are regenerated. There is no substance in the body that is constant, though heart and brain cells endure longer than most. And the substances that coexist at a given time produce thousands of biochemical reactions in the body each and every second.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The remarkable fact emerging from this sea of quantum mystery is that particles, and the atoms constituted by particles, are not individual beasts. They are sociable entities, and under certain conditions they are so thoroughly “entangled” with each other that they are not just here or there, but in all measured places at the same time. Their nonlocality respects neither time nor space: it exists whether the distance that separates the particles and the atoms is measured in millimeters or in light-years, and whether the time that separates them consists of seconds or of millions of years.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The set of virtual states into which a given particle, atom, or molecule can jump—unlike the jumps themselves—is not random. The order of a given particle’s (or atom’s or molecule’s) set of virtual states controls the translational, vibrational, and rotational motion of that particle (or atom or molecule). This virtual-state order determines the movement of chemical systems across surfaces of potential energy by leading them from one conformal state to another—from one kind of chemical or biochemical ensemble to another.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“As just remarked, every particle, every atom, and every molecule possesses not only the state that it occupies when it is observed, but also states that are empty and hence are said to be “virtual.” Virtual states are described by probability functions and bits of information. They become real when a particle, an atom, or a molecule “jumps” into them.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“In periods of scientific revolution, when the established paradigm is under pressure, many science fables are put forward but not all pan out. Theoreticians proceed on the assumption that, as Galileo said, “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics” and forget that not everything in the language of mathematics has a place in the book of nature. As a result many mathematically sophisticated fables remain just that—fables. Others, however, harbor the seeds of significant scientific advance. Initially, nobody knows for sure which of the seeds will grow and bear fruit. The field is in ferment, in a state of creative chaos.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“Suppose that when it is measured, a quantum such as an electron has a 50 percent probability of going up and a 50 percent probability of going down. Then we do not have just one universe in which the quantum has a 50/50 probability of going up or going down, but two parallel universes. In one of the universes the electron is actually going up and in the other it is actually going down.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“with infinite intelligence and creative power. The field of cosmic consciousness they experience is a cosmic emptiness—a void. Yet, paradoxically, it is also an essential fullness. Although it does not feature anything in a concretely manifest form, it contains all of existence in potential. The vacuum they experience is a plenum: nothing is missing in it. It is the ultimate source of existence, the cradle of all being. It is pregnant with the possibility of everything there is. The phenomenal world is its creation: the realization and concretization of its inherent potential.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“This is not just a fanciful supposition: there is indirect yet significant evidence for it. It comes from the farther reaches of contemporary consciousness research. Stanislav Grof found that in deeply altered states of consciousness, many people experience a kind of consciousness that appears to be that of the universe itself. This most remarkable of altered-state experiences surfaces in individuals who are committed to the quest of apprehending the ultimate grounds of existence. When the seekers come close to attaining their goal, their descriptions of what they regard as the supreme principle of existence are strikingly similar. They describe what they experience as an immense and unfathomable field of consciousness endowed”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“We can tune our consciousness to resonate with the holograms in the A-field. The transmission of information in a field of holograms is known: it occurs when the wavefields that make up two (or more) holograms are “conjugate” with each other. The effect is similar to the more familiar effect known as resonance. Tuning forks and strings on musical instruments resonate with other forks and strings that are tuned to the same frequency (or to entire octaves higher or lower than that frequency). The resonance effect is selective: it does not occur when the forks and strings are tuned to a different, unrelated frequency.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“In the last count matter is but a waveform disturbance in the quasi-infinite energy- and in-formation-sea that is the connecting field, and the enduring memory, of the universe.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“Although it is undifferentiated, Brahman is dynamic and creative. From its ultimate “being” comes the temporary “becoming” of the manifest world, with its attributes, functions, and relationships. The cycles of samsara—of being-to-becoming and again of becoming-to-being—are the lila of Brahman: its play of ceaseless creation and dissolution. In Indian philosophy, absolute reality is the reality of Brahman. The manifest world enjoys but a derived, secondary reality and mistaking it for the real is the illusion of maya. The absolute reality of Brahman and the derived reality of the manifest world constitute a co-created and constantly co-creating whole: this is the advaitavada (the nonduality) of the universe.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“But information by things on other levels is less intense and evident than information by things that correspond to a thing’s own level.
(P.108]”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

“The most fundamental element of reality is the quantum vacuum, the energy- and in-formation-filled plenum that underlies, generates, and interacts with our universe, and with whatever universes may exist in the Metaverse.”
― Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything